Small Hiatus coming up
Small Hiatus coming up Nope, I'm not tired or bored with Green Antarctica, and I'm not giving up the timeline. It's just that I'm doing an online novel, and its getting to be time to write a bunch of chapters. Anyway, here are some ideas, hints, teasers etc. * The Bronze Age is going to be interesting. The Yag, living in a flood basin aren't going to do well. The Ptahr are sitting on their sources of copper, and tin, so they're going to be bronze consumers and very hard done by. The Azul will do much better, their settlements and hinterlands upriver have given them access to tin and bronze, and allowed them to establish trade routes. The Zhudan will be the big Bronze lords. Tsalmothua will lag badly. If the Coal Age was an age of Empires, the Bronze Age is probably going to be the age of city states. * I have a plausible scenario for the early development of gunpowder in Tsalmothua. The idea I'm playing with is that the Tsalal never develop cannon and thus never develop firearms. What happens is that they acquire gunpowder when the metallurgy of the age is pretty poor. They have early experiments with cannon and stuff, but given their state of metallurgy, they find a better payoff with rockets. Attention and innovation goes into making rockets more accurate, more deadly, until that aspect of technology literally strangles the other in the cradle. Rockets and rocket tactics are so much more advanced and effective, so much more perfected, so accurate and lethal, that even when the metallurgy catches up - advanced rockets are just superior to crude cannon. The cannon never develops, and small firearms don't develop out of cannon. They do develop a sort of torpedo as a sea-rocket. When the Tsalal capture James Cook, they're amazed at the cannon, an utterly alien line of technology to what they developed. But their rockets have vastly superior range and devastating power. * The Iron Age I haven't made many decisions about, except that bronze and iron societies are going to coexist and duke it out for a while. * I want to cover a Tsalal age of exploration, which results in lost expeditions and the disappointing results of the discovery and settlement of the cold islands. If possible, I'd love to develop something stomach turning for the cold islands. A society that creeps even the other Tsalal out. * And there's a grab bag of topics that I want to explore: Plagues and epidemics, the great Island nations of West Antarctica, religions, societies, disgusting practices, etc. I'm kind of intrigued by notions of stable long term cultures and brand new ones. Take Egypt and England. Egyptian culture was around for an immensely long time, even under Babylonians, Greeks, Romans and Arabs, Egyptians were essentially Egyptians, maybe even as late as the middle ages. You get that - Persia, very old in different incarnations. Middle eastern cultures, Syria, the Kurds, Yemen, all very long term. Han Chinese, etc. So looking at the Tsalal, its not unlikely or impossible that cultures I've been messing about with in their early civilization - Yag, Azul, Zhudan, Ptahr, Tsalmothu are all still around thousands of years later in some form or other. But then look at Europe - entire cultures, even languages, in literal flux and transformation to the point where even a few centuries and its just not the same place. Of course, Europe had lots of inputs from everywhere. The Tsalal are isolated on their own continent, they're not dealing with Arab invasions, slave trades, ottoman turks, russians, byzantines, mongols, huns, etc. etc. Still, alongside the long term stable cultures, I think we'll see some flux cultures. * I suspect I may get a little out of my depth with an alternate gunpowder technology. Another area that I'll probably fall out on is steam technology. As I visualize it, the sunken cities, as they grow, are going to have major issues in terms of drainage, flooding, air circulation, heating etc., which is going to drive the development of air and water circulation, storage, piping, containers, etc. These problems will tend to kill a lot of people, cause cities to be abandoned or barely liveable hellholes. But the'll also drive a lot of empirical trial and error problem solving. That'll tend to drive technologies in certain directions different from western societies. So, I see them developing something like a Newcomen steam engine relatively early say, circa 1000 to 1500 BP, if for no other reason than to maintain habitability, by pumping out mines and lower levels. Incremental progress produces more complex machines, until we've got high pressure and reciprocating motion. Some of the ideas I'm playing with is that higher local energy costs and competition for energy, and different social and habitat structures drive the development of steam technology to different applications and forms. As with rockets and cannon, steam technology matures to a point where it simply chokes off the development of internal combustion engines, which never really go anywhere. By the time he shows up, Cook finds a civilization with a very mature steam tech, which due to its applications, isn't really obvious or overt or fully appreciated by westerners. * I think standardized and quite precise units of measurement are going to show up fairly early in these societies - indeed, I think the Coal Kingdoms probably founded early standard units, and these have spread and refined. Social emphasis on precision will tend to drive incremental improvements to simple machineries like lathes, and rather earlier development of things like standardized or interchangeable parts rather than loose artisanship. There'll be a variety of local factors driving this. *I'm giving away a lot of cards here folks, I hope you appreciate them. *Anyway, having basically gone into rocket and steam tech, there are other things I'm kind of wondering about. I assume if I'd kept my trap shut, I'd have figured it out by the time I started pulling those rabbits out of hats, but here goes - I think the Tsalal chemistry will be trial and error, and there's going to be lots of bad or mistaken ideas there, but there'll be serviceable stuff. But what about electricity and magnetism? How will this play into their evolving tech, and what bearing will uneven resource distribution, different social priorities, different contemporary technologies and levels of technology, differences in energy costs and economics come into play. Essentially, I was playing with the notion of the Tsalal as non-combustion engine, non-electricity steampunks. I want to keep internal combustion out, but can I or should I keep electricity out? I dunno. Stylistically: I want to do more of Hunter S. Thompson, Howard Philips, maybe a bit of William S. Burroughs, another National Geographic, some journal entries from Captain Cook, a bit of Jared Diamond, oh, and I've got a wonderful idea for a delightfully nasty AH history forum thread where some squick fancies the idea of the Tsalal age of exploration actually discovering one or more of the other continents. And of course, excerpts from texbooks, lectures, bits of folklore, lexicon terms, etc. And I want to make the whole thing terrifying, evil, disturbing, disgusting, so utterly alien and repulsive that you just want to cleanse the south pole with nuclear fire. Anyway, that's what's coming. Hopefully, you'll find it fun and interesting. My goal is to eventually work my way up to 1772 and Captain Cook. And of course, after that, things could get really interesting. ----- Been enjoying the story but, gotta say my throw nukes at the problem till it goes away threshold is pretty low, heck it was reached right around the time the would be farmer slit his son's throat and contemplated raping his daughter, not sure about any one else on the board, still all in all its been a helluva ride, and I want to see what happens next. - I can do better.